Seinfeld's former car rolls into auction block for over $65,000

Lotus is a niche British car brand that has been around since 1952. Its biggest moment in pop culture was when Richard Gere drove a Lotus Esprit in Pretty Woman. Lotus made only 583 of its Exige in the first year of production from 2000 to 2001, and only a fraction of those made it to the US. Since then, the company has created a handful of variants with fewer production numbers.Bloomberg | May 19, 2017, 08:30 IST

A 2009 Lotus Exige S260 formerly owned by the comic will go on sale this month at an auction in Midland, Texas.

The four cylinder, 257-horsepower sports coupe is primed to stand out from the crowd: It has a carbonfibre split bumper, a highangled real spoiler, spindly 12-spoke alloy wheels, black gaping side air-intake ducts, and a `Kawasaki Green' body formed like a beetle.

With a six-speed manual transmission and rearwheel-drive, the Exige was the first Lotus made to be able to handle both street and track driving.

Lotus is a niche British car brand that has been around since 1952. Its biggest moment in pop culture was when Richard Gere drove a Lotus Esprit in Pretty Woman. Lotus made only 583 of its Exige in the first year of production from 2000 to 2001, and only a fraction of those made it to the US. Since then, the company has created a handful of variants with fewer production numbers.When the modern Exige S was launched in 2006, it was the quickest street-legal car that Lotus had ever built, with a zero-to-60 mph sprint time of 4.1 seconds.

When the car made its debut in 2009, the base price was $75,000. Today, a used one costs $60,000. A V6 version costs closer to $85,000 Seinfeld will surely take more than that -the auction house estimates it'll go for $65,000 to $75,000. Celebrity ownership in general can push a car's value even higher. But when Seinfeld sold 18 of his Porsches last year, the sum total was a bit less than the $28 million-to-$32 million estimate (they went for $22.2 million in total), and he sold this one to its current owner in 2012.

In fact, segment leaders like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Hero MotoCorp have reported de-growth of 34.3 per cent, 45 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively giving a clear indication of a prolonged slowdown in the sector.